The ESP8266 modules are available individually or in a development platform; the last system simplifies its usage as the development kit contains all the hardware to use rapidly the soc device; we are already ready to load the firmware and use the device.

On internet various web sites describe home automation or iot projects using this soc.

We’ll use the Nodemcu development kit. This kit contains the AI-Thinker ESP-12/ESP-12E modules. In the ebay search we have as results ESP8266 ESP-01 modules too and development kits from other vendors.

On the Nodemcu github we can find the development kits we’ll use afterward. There are two versions

In next articles we’ll describe how to obtain the Nodemcu firmware, how to load it on the device, how to compile it and we’ll show some example using the LUA scripting language utilized by the Nodemcu firmware